The Erotic as Power in the Fiction of Gayl Jones

The Erotic as Power in the Fiction of Gayl Jones PDF Author: Nanci R. Calamari
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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The Erotic as Power in the Fiction of Gayl Jones

The Erotic as Power in the Fiction of Gayl Jones PDF Author: Nanci R. Calamari
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description


Gayl Jones

Gayl Jones PDF Author: Casey Clabough
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786433795
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
Gayl Jones is dedicated to the art of "verbal authenticity," stemming from her identification with her African American heritage. Amid widespread critical praise as well as pointed attacks for her controversial first two novels, Jones has shown a constantly evolving cultural consciousness. This first single-author study of Gayl Jones recovers the work of an under-examined yet immensely skillful contemporary writer. It offers a thorough examination of her technical innovations as well as her willingness to explore controversial subject matter. The book addresses such crucial themes as Afrocentrism, diasporas, mythopoesis, post-colonialism and globalization, and offers close readings of the aesthetic and political interchanges within Jones's fiction, drama, poetry, and criticism. Two interviews with Gayl Jones are included.

Corregidora

Corregidora PDF Author: Gayl Jones
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 0807096989
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 149

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Book Description
Here is Gayl Jones's classic novel, the tale of blues singer Ursa, consumed by her hatred of the nineteenth-century slave master who fathered both her grandmother and mother.

The Sexual Demon of Colonial Power

The Sexual Demon of Colonial Power PDF Author: Greg Thomas
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253348412
Category : African Americans
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
A political, cultural, and intellectual study of race, sex, and Western empire. This book interrogates a system that represents race, gender, sexuality, and class in certain systematic and oppressive ways. It connects sex and eroticism to geopolitics to examine the logic, operations, and politics of sexuality in the West.

Speaking Power

Speaking Power PDF Author: DoVeanna S. Fulton Minor
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791482316
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description
In Speaking Power, DoVeanna S. Fulton explores and analyzes the use of oral traditions in African American women's autobiographical and fictional narratives of slavery. African American women have consistently employed oral traditions not only to relate the pain and degradation of slavery, but also to celebrate the subversions, struggles, and triumphs of Black experience. Fulton examines orality as a rhetorical strategy, its role in passing on family and personal history, and its ability to empower, subvert oppression, assert agency, and create representations for the past. In addition to taking an insightful look at obscure or little-studied slave narratives like Louisa Picquet, the Octoroon and the Narrative of Sojourner Truth, Fulton also brings a fresh perspective to more familiar works, such as Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Harriet Wilson's Our Nig, and highlights Black feminist orality in such works as Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God and Gayl Jones's Corregidora.

The Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction, 2 Volumes

The Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction, 2 Volumes PDF Author: Patrick O'Donnell
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1119431719
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 1607

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Book Description
Fresh perspectives and eye-opening discussions of contemporary American fiction In The Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction: 1980-2020, a team of distinguished scholars delivers a focused and in-depth collection of essays on some of the most significant and influential authors and literary subjects of the last four decades. Cutting-edge entries from established and new voices discuss subjects as varied as multiculturalism, contemporary regionalisms, realism after poststructuralism, indigenous narratives, globalism, and big data in the context of American fiction from the last 40 years. The Encyclopedia provides an overview of American fiction at the turn of the millennium as well as a vision of what may come. It perfectly balances analysis, summary, and critique for an illuminating treatment of the subject matter. This collection also includes: An exciting mix of established and emerging contributors from around the world discussing central and cutting-edge topics in American fiction studies Focused, critical explorations of authors and subjects of critical importance to American fiction Topics that reflect the energies and tendencies of contemporary American fiction from the forty years between 1980 and 2020 The Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction: 1980-2020 is a must-have resource for undergraduate and graduate students of American literature, English, creative writing, and fiction studies. It will also earn a place in the libraries of scholars seeking an authoritative array of contributions on both established and newer authors of contemporary fiction.

A New Literary History of America

A New Literary History of America PDF Author: Greil Marcus
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674064100
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 1129

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Book Description
America is a nation making itself up as it goes alongÑa story of discovery and invention unfolding in speeches and images, letters and poetry, unprecedented feats of scholarship and imagination. In these myriad, multiform, endlessly changing expressions of the American experience, the authors and editors of this volume find a new American history. In more than two hundred original essays, A New Literary History of America brings together the nationÕs many voices. From the first conception of a New World in the sixteenth century to the latest re-envisioning of that world in cartoons, television, science fiction, and hip hop, the book gives us a new, kaleidoscopic view of what ÒMade in AmericaÓ means. Literature, music, film, art, history, science, philosophy, political rhetoricÑcultural creations of every kind appear in relation to each other, and to the time and place that give them shape. The meeting of minds is extraordinary as T. J. Clark writes on Jackson Pollock, Paul Muldoon on Carl Sandburg, Camille Paglia on Tennessee Williams, Sarah Vowell on Grant WoodÕs American Gothic, Walter Mosley on hard-boiled detective fiction, Jonathan Lethem on Thomas Edison, Gerald Early on Tarzan, Bharati Mukherjee on The Scarlet Letter, Gish Jen on Catcher in the Rye, and Ishmael Reed on Huckleberry Finn. From Anne Bradstreet and John Winthrop to Philip Roth and Toni Morrison, from Alexander Graham Bell and Stephen Foster to Alcoholics Anonymous, Life, Chuck Berry, Alfred Hitchcock, and Ronald Reagan, this is America singing, celebrating itself, and becoming something altogether different, plural, singular, new. Please visit www.newliteraryhistory.com for more information.

Conjuring Moments in African American Literature

Conjuring Moments in African American Literature PDF Author: K. Samuel
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137336811
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 172

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Book Description
This book engages the ways African American authors have shifted, recycled, and reinvented the conjure woman in fiction. Kameelah Martin Samuel traces her presence and function in twentieth-century literature through historical records, oral histories, blues music, and collections of African American folklore.

Literary Trauma

Literary Trauma PDF Author: Deborah M. Horvitz
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791491897
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
This book examines portrayals of political and psychological trauma, particularly sexual trauma, in the work of seven American women writers. Concentrating on novels by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Pauline Hopkins, Gayl Jones, Leslie Marmon Silko, Dorothy Allison, Joyce Carol Oates, and Margaret Atwood, Horvitz investigates whether memories of violent and oppressive trauma can be preserved, even transformed into art, without reproducing that violence. The book encompasses a wide range of personal and political traumas, including domestic abuse, incest, rape, imprisonment, and slavery, and argues that an analysis of sadomasochistic violence is our best protection against cyclical, intergenerational violence, a particularly timely and important subject as we think about how to stop "hate" crimes and other forms of political and psychic oppression.

Poetry Was There Between Us: Women's Erotic Literature as Sites of Resistance and Integrity

Poetry Was There Between Us: Women's Erotic Literature as Sites of Resistance and Integrity PDF Author: Anna Maria Esquivel
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Erotic literature remains a blind spot in modern or contemporary literary criticism, even though sex and sexual identity is a widely accepted component of individual, social, and cultural identity. However, a careful investigation of erotic literature can provide valuable insight into how we constitute ourselves as subjects. Based on an understanding of the erotic and erotic literatures as sites of resistance, bonding, and belonging, I explore how the erotic--and consequently texts and ideology that privilege the erotic--remains a powerful site for negotiating power, constructing identity, and forming new intimacies. The primary modalities of the erotic are difference and interconnectedness. It is through this modality that erotic narratives critique the socio-historical violations and fissures of identity and subjectivity, yet simultaneously promote re-membering through the flows and processes of knowing and becoming, all while inhabiting integrity. Connecting these definitions of eroticism with the concept of "integral space" and the politics of integrity, I argue that eroticism and erotic literature map the processes by which subjects connect and bond through difference. Beginning with the ways in which erotic literature uses silences and absences in its texts, I explore the possibility of a prediscursive body paradoxically located in the language of erotic literature. While erotic theories explore the ways in which naming and speaking the deeply private, silent spaces of oppression, trauma, and abuse are powerful acts of resistance to cultural and social oppressions, works by Nikki Giovanni and Audre Lorde, as well as Kalamu ya Salaam and Etheridge Knight, suggest that silence, too, is a powerful force that leads to wholeness, healing, and connecting. Further, I investigate discursive and nondiscursive strategies in the erotic novel The Proof of the Honey by Salwa Al Neimi and Gayl Jones's Corregidora and how these literature employ body, voice, and metaphor as part of the erotic project. Each of these texts, I argue, reclaim the erotic space where individual subjectivities can meet each other, explore sexual boundaries, trangress those boundaries safely, and challenge the social, political, and historical limitations of identity.